Liam Neeson, eh? Other than morphing into Kevin Spacey it’s difficult to see how the actor could more effectively have sabotaged his own success. And Spacey took years to accomplish what Neeson managed in a 17-minute encounter.

It was one of those moments when your eyes are suddenly opened, your illusions are stripped away and you are forced to confront the world as it really is rather than as you’d like it to be. Lord Ashcroft’s bag-carrier, teller of pig tales, and ghost writer for Arron Banks, Isabel Oakeshott, was dancing to her pay-masters’ tune on last week’s Question Time when she declared Theresa May had little choice but to walk away from negotiations. There was no alternative to a No Deal Brexit, she insisted.

Shortly after MPs voted against the government to limit the Treasury’s powers in the event of no deal, Steve Anglesey, journalist for the pro-Remain newspaper The New European, tweeted a photograph of Yvette Cooper with the caption: “The leader of the Opposition has turned up.”

Donald Trump is still US president… the Brexit deadline looms without any prospect of a deal… Scandi Noir favourite The Bridge is no more…Yet despite the gloom, there are plenty of positives in store in 2019 to temper the misery

On the first day of Operation Desert Storm, in January 1991, the editor of the newspaper I was working on strode into his office and took command of his “troops.” He was a small, irascible Scot with a conceit of himself as an attack dog and never had we seen him so much in his element as when he was organising for copies of the papers to be sent out to “our boys”. So transported was he hatching plans and co-ordinating manoeuvres, he clearly imagined himself as a general on whose strategical nous the lives of frontline soldiers depended.

It’s quite creative, if self-defeating, for ScotRail to turn itself into some kind of metaphor for the Tory government’s handling of Brexit. Here we are in a state of crisis – trains cancelled, poor communication and a dearth of trained staff – and how does it behave? It tries to shift the blame while promising customers that out of chaos will emerge a strong and stable – sorry, I mean much-enhanced – service for commuters.

It’s a pity billionaire Denise Coates forged her success by preying on human weakness, awarding herself a whopping £265 million salary, because in other circumstances she would surely be a feminist role model.